The committee of the FirebirdSQL Foundation of course took the chance to make its first "non-virtual" meeting, with 9 of the 11 committee members actually sitting in the same room (see below).

Most important: since the conference was such a success, Holger Klemt (who organized it) said that there will definetly be another conference next year - so for all those that couldn't make it this time, be sure to watch out for announcements for the 2004 conference! So...

One of the really nice things about the conference was that you got some direct face-to-face feedback on the work you did that you normally wouldn't get via the internet. As an example, Arno Brinkmann was obviously quite impressed when he told his name and got instant applause from the crowd! (He worked on the Query Optimizer for Fb1.5 and did such a good job that it now really diserves the name "Optimizer" :-)

After that, every speaker gave an overview on what work he/she did and the sessions they would give. Each one entered the room with a printed mask held before the face, the contents of which I will not reveal here to reduce the risk of being shot by Jim Starkey <bg>... (Ann Harrison: "I'm not going to do this, you know I've got to live with that man!)

The remaining day was fully packed with interesting sessions, and the only pity here was that you could not see all of them as there were mostly two or three held in parallel.

The special evening session by Ann, titled "Internals of the Fb engine and ingredients of German beer", evolved into a superb discussion between - amongst others - Ann, Sean Leyne, and especially Nickolai Samofatov. That was very interesting, and the best part about it was that the beer was for free!!

The evening went on in "private" and intense discussions in little groups in the hotel restaurant and bar, so that some of us got very little sleep that night...

I would like to especially mention Martijn Tonies, who staid with us till half past four or so (convincing Jason that a Cherokee Jeep is nothing compared to his Unimog) and actually managed to give his first session at 8 o'clock next morning - my deepest respect! Unfortunatly his session about his dbWorkbench wasn't attended by too many folks, for obvious reasons...

The originally planned closing session "future roadmap for Firebird" should have been held by Dmitry Emanov, who - sad enough - couldn't come. (We all really missed you, Dmitry! Hope you can make it next year!) Well, since he wasn't there and much of the topic was covered in Ann's evening session on monday, it was agreed to drop the session and replace it with some "audience interaction":

I had made some t-shirts with the Foundation logo on the front and the FirebirdSQL logo on the back that were all sold during the conference, collecting some more money for the Foundation. We took one of those and had it signed by all of the speakers, and then Lucas did a really great job in auctioning that very special shirt and one of the two "Sparkys" Helen had made ("Who else is willing to spend some money on a t-shirt he is not going to get?" :-) - that made up a nice sum for the Foundation!

This was the official end of the conference, but obviously we couldn't let the chance go past to have an official and - for the first time - public meeting of the Foundation committee (see photos below). We discussed several issues and decided on a few things that would have probably taken us a week at least if we had done it the "normal" way - by sending emails right around the planet...

The "finale grande" after that was a collective meal at a local chinese restaurant by those that remained, and - needless to say - it ended up in more in-depth discussion of engine internals led by Nickolai and Sean ;-)

We were all quite sad it was now really over, but the goodbye wasn't so bad because we knew by then there would surely be another conference next year. And boy are we looking forward to that!

http://www.frred.de/FBConference/index.htm (Lucas Frantzen)
http://tunantes.com/galeria/fulda (Artur Anjos)
http://www.ko-software.com/firebird/2003-05-24Germany/ (Mark O'Donohue)

If you have more links to Conference photos, please drop me a note so I can include them here!